Did my Parallels just vanish? Where'd it go?

[happyrobot]

Happy pre-new years everyone.
Last March I bought a shiny new Macbook Pro and a copy of Parallels. I installed my copy of Parallels Desktop 5 and all has been fine since then. It's worked well and I've had no complaints.

Until this morning.

I click the Parallels icon on my dock and instead of the usual Parallels start-up window, I get a window telling me that I have to register my copy of Parallels. That is odd I think, because when I installed it I had to enter the serial number.

I enter the serial number again and that all seems to go through.

Now, when I try to open Parallels I get the "New Virtual Machine Assistant" window that is wanting me to point it to the CD of the OS so that it can install a new operating system.
Dubya.Tee.Eff?
My copy of Windows that had files and programs installed and had been working fine for months seems to have vanished.

Am I missing something?
Is it all lost?
Any idea where my XP went?

 

[happyrobot]

Follow-up

Just in case something like this happens to someone else, this somehow fixed itself.
I found the actual .pvm file. There's a specific location for it, but I just used Spotlight and found it that way.
Clicking on the .PVM file launched my VM and I was back to how it used to be.

Now, the part I didn't expect was that now when I click on the Parallels icon in my dock (it was taking me to the 'create new vm' prompt) it suddenly went back to normal; that is launching my VM.
Hmmm. Odd.

So, if your VM vanishes, find the .PVM file and run that. Things, at least in my case, then seem to fix themselves.